Is BioShock as Good as you Remember?

This was originally released as a video on my YouTube channel which can be viewed below. If you prefer to consume your media by reading, then please scroll on adventurer!

For those of us who grew up with a controller in hand, there’s nothing quite like dusting off an old favorite and asking the big question: "Is it as good as I remember? Does the magic still hold up, or has it aged into a relic of a bygone era?" Better yet, could it still hook a new generation today, or are we just blinded by the sweet glow of nostalgia?

Today, we’re diving deep beneath the ocean to look into a title that revolutionized the First Person Shooter. I’m talking of course about BioShock.

Released in 2007, this masterpiece dragged us into the depths of Rapture and asked us if we’d "kindly" rethink everything we knew about choice in gaming.

Does this underwater utopia still feel like a masterpiece or... is it finally starting to leak?

I’ve been playing video games for most of my life and BioShock holds a pretty special place in my heart, and here’s why:

My very first game console I received during my 6th Christmas was a Super Nintendo (S-N-E-S for those of us who say it correctly), and with it I received Super Mario World and Turtles in Time. From then I was hooked. I grew a love for video games that lasts to this day. However, there was a time where my love for games started to wane a bit. It was right after I had graduated from high school. The PS2 was on its way out and making way for the PS3/Xbox 360/Wii console generation. I had my first full time job, had gotten a girlfriend and video games kind of got pushed to the side. I still kept up with some of the big news, but I kind of felt that I might be leaving video games behind. That is… until I saw a friend playing BioShock (at that time exclusively for the Xbox 360). Just when I thought maybe my video game days were behind me... They pulled me right back in.

It wasn’t long after that I fully integrated myself into the 7th generation of consoles. The 360, PS3 and Wii. BioShock was, to me and many others, a breath of fresh air in a genre that had become oversaturated and sometimes stale. I recently revisited BioShock in its remastered edition, it was the first time I’ve played the game since the 360 years... So by the end of this article, I’ll be answering the question: Is BioShock as good as I remember?

Development and Release

Let’s start off by taking a look at the studio that built it: Irrational Games. Founded in 1997 by Ken Levine, Jon Chey, and Rob Fermier, this core team cut their teeth at the legendary developer Looking Glass Studios. The studio that put the immersive sim on the map with PC titles like System Shock and Thief: The Dark Project. These games emphasized player choice by encouraging players to solve problems in different ways, instead of forcing you down one set, linear path.

Irrational Games initially struggled to find its footing and eventually wound up partnering with their old employers at Looking Glass to co-develop System Shock 2, a game that was praised as a critical masterpiece. Unfortunately for them, critical acclaim doesn't always keep the lights on. System Shock 2 launched to phenomenal reviews but abysmal sales, selling what director Ken Levine jokingly called "like five copies".

Irrational games struggled for some time until 2K games eventually acquired them. This would give the team a much larger budget to work with. For their next game, the team decided on an underwater setting, and with that locked in, they needed a reason for this place to exist. Levine had been reading Ayn Rand, and the Objectivist philosophy perfectly fit the idea of a secluded, unregulated utopia at the bottom of the sea. The visual aesthetic didn't truly click until Levine was visiting Rockefeller Center in New York and he was inspired by the Art Deco style of the buildings there.

Getting the visual identity right was only half the battle. They had to figure out a way to incentivize players to interact with the game's toughest enemies, The Big Daddy. The concept of a hulking protector and a vulnerable gatherer was born out of wanting to display primal, nature-documentary behaviors.

As a side note: the Little Sisters originally started out as literal sea slugs. It wasn’t long before the developers realized that players felt absolutely zero empathy for some slug crawling on the floor, so they pivoted to the creepy little girls we know of today. This forced a genuine moral choice onto the player: do you save them for a meager reward, or harvest them for maximum power?

Things were coming along well, but as development neared its end, the game was hit with a big, overlooked problem: A late focus test was so disastrous that Levine compared the feedback to a doctor delivering terrible news. Players were being dropped directly into the water without context, and they simply didn't understand who they were or why they should care. And I mean think about it, imagine you pop in BioShock for the first time and your character is just floating in the middle of the ocean. Doesn’t really do a great job of setting things up if you ask me. 

With virtually no budget and less than a month before the game had to be certified, the team desperately needed an intro to bridge the gap. They coded a rudimentary intro sequence into the engine, threw up the BioShock logo, and Levine frantically wrote a radio play to loop over.

That 11th-hour fix is exactly what set the game's tone. When BioShock finally dropped in August 2007, it completely shifted the model for the first person shooter genre and games in general. It dominated the industry, pulling in flawless review scores and racking up practically every Game of the Year trophy in existence.

Story

It’s 1960. You play as Jack, a passenger on a plane that crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, conveniently next to a random lighthouse. After swimming through the burning wreckage and entering the structure,you hop into a bathysphere, and take a ride down to a neon-soaked metropolis at the bottom of the ocean, Rapture.

Rapture is the brainchild of Andrew Ryan, an extraordinary wealthy man who longed for a completely unregulated capitalist utopia. A place where scientists and artists could do whatever they wanted without the government or pesky morals getting in the way. "No gods, no kings, only man."

But the second you step out of that bathysphere, it’s obvious the whole experiment went horribly wrong. The city is leaking, people have deteriorated into junkies, and society has totally collapsed.

Why? A genetic material called ADAM.

Found in sea slugs, ADAM rewrites human DNA, allowing people to have supernatural abilities like shooting lightning or using telekinesis. The catch is that it’s wildly addictive and aggressively rots your brain. A smuggler named Frank Fontaine realized this and monopolized the ADAM trade, kicking off a civil war with Ryan.

Trapped in the middle of this mess, you get a radio transmission from an Irish rebel named Atlas. He promises to help you survive if you help him save his family. So, you spend the game juicing up on Plasmids, fighting off mutated "Splicers," and dealing with the Big Daddies and Little Sisters (the city's tragic, biological ADAM-harvesting duo).

The storytelling here is just incredibly well done, even when looking at it through today’s lens. Building a sprawling city at the bottom of the Atlantic is a pretty fantastical concept but the game grounds itself so perfectly that you find yourself buying right into the illusion that Rapture could be a real place.

What really sells Rapture’s spectacular fall from grace is the cast you meet along the way. Ryan and Fontaine might be pulling the strings, but the city’s day-to-day horrors are run by its so-called "best and brightest" who have completely lost their minds; either to ADAM or their own unchecked ego. 

The game also gives you a choice for exactly how invested in the story you want to be. Sure the main plot points are played out through in-game cinematics, but scattered throughout the game are over 100 audio tapes providing even more context to the overarching story. 

Visuals

The aesthetic of BioShock is what initially drew me in when it launched (I feel like its probably what drew in most people), and here we are nearly 20 years later and remastered version or not, it’s still gorgeous. The visual integrity of this game has successfully stood the test of time.

BioShock was built on an Unreal Engine that was already five years old when the game released. The team squeezed every drop out of it and at launch it was genuinely jaw-dropping. Critics at the time called it some of the best water rendering they had ever seen in a game, and the PC version pushed DirectX 10 to deliver real-time ripples and reflections that made Rapture feel alive in a way most games simply couldn't match. But while technical achievements often have a shelf life, art direction does not.

Once the team made the decision to use the Art Deco style for the game, it perfectly set the atmosphere and tone for rapture. The bold geometry, symmetrical lines, and hard metallic surfaces of 1930s architecture were actually much easier for their heavily modified Unreal Engine 2.5 to render than complex, organic environments.

There's something that Art Deco brings to Rapture that no other art style really could have. The whole movement was built around this idea of glamour and progress. This idea that "the future is bright, humanity is capable of great things and we can build something beautiful..." And then you take that optimism, let it rot at the bottom of the ocean, and suddenly the decaying city starts to visually tell you a story. The grandeur of the place makes the fall of it hit much harder. If Rapture looked like a generic concrete bunker, or a modern day office building, you wouldn't feel the tragedy of what happened there, but because it looks like it was once genuinely magnificent, like people had real pride in building it, the decay means something. It sets the entire emotional foundation of the game and it’s something that very few games did back when BioShock released. There’s no wonder this game won just about every single art direction award the industry had to offer.

There's a difference between a game that looked good and a game that was designed well. BioShock was both, but it's the design really that carries it. Every area of Rapture has its own distinct visual personality. For example: the Medical Pavilion has this cold, clinical dread to it complete with flickering lights, bloodstained tile, the feeling that something horrible happened here recently. Fort Frolic is the opposite, all theatrical grandeur and unsettling glamour... but I guess also the feeling that something horrible happened here recently too.  Each of these environments tells you something before a single word of dialogue is spoken, and that kind of environmental storytelling doesn't rely on texture resolution to land.

The lighting especially deserves credit here. There's a warmth and intentionality to the way Rapture is lit, that a lot of modern games, with all their ray tracing and global illumination, still struggle to get right. Harsh incandescent bulbs casting hard shadows. Neon signs reflecting across wet floors. Fires flickering in spaces that have clearly been without power for a while. It creates this layered, almost painted quality that makes every room feel considered. Like someone thought carefully about what this space should feel like, not just what it should look like.

Now some of the character models do show their age, the faces in particular have that slightly waxy quality that's pretty common for games of that era. But honestly? This just lends itself to the art direction of the game in my opinion.

The mark of truly great art direction earns a kind of suspension of disbelief that pure technical power can't buy. BioShock earned it in 2007, and it's still earning it today. Nearly two decades later, stepping off that bathysphere and seeing Rapture for the first time still hits and that's just good design doing what good design does... lasting!

Audio

The audio of BioShock is something I genuinely don't think gets talked about enough. And just like the visuals, the reason it still holds up today comes down to the same core idea, artistic choices outlasting technology.

For starters, the score drew from modernistic classical music to create an unearthly atmosphere, with some pieces written specifically for key scenes like the first reveal of Rapture. It went on to win Music of the Year, Best Interactive Score, Best Original Instrumental, and Audio of the Year at the Game Audio Network Guild awards.

But what makes the music so smart is what it's paired with. BioShock's licensed soundtrack pulled real recordings from the mid-twentieth century. Artists like Django Reinhardt, Bobby Darin and Bing Crosby play on phonographs throughout Rapture. So you've got this genuinely eerie orchestral score underneath everything, and then you turn a corner to hear a scratchy jazz record playing in an abandoned restaurant. That contrast of glamour and dread sitting right next to each other is doing so much to really make the setting come alive. 

The ambient sound design plays a huge role as well. The creaking metal, dripping water, and distant splashes create a constant reminder of the underwater environment you're trapped in. The echoing footsteps, the distorted muttering of Splicers you can hear but can't see yet, works to keep you on edge before anything has even happened. Ken Levine was so focused on getting the audio mix right that near the end of development, he had the team find the worst TV in the studio and listened to the entire mix through it, just to make sure it held up even in the worst conditions. That level of care really shows.

The voice acting deserves its own mention. For a game where most of your story comes through audio logs and radio transmissions rather than cutscenes, the performances had to carry a lot of weight, and they certainly deliver. In fact, every character in this game is brought to life through voice. Andrew Ryan, Atlas, Tenenbaum, Sander Cohen, etc. The voice actors all do a stellar job of bringing these characters to life well before you ever see them in game.

Gameplay

When BioShock launched in 2007, the single player FPS genre was starting to plateau. The genre was insanely popular in 2007, but was in need of some new innovations. 2007 proved to be a great year for the FPS starting with BioShock’s release and followed up by games like Portal and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (yes, my disdain for Call of Duty aside, I have to admit that this game was a huge innovation for online multiplayer games at this time). But for most FPS’s you had a gun, you pointed it at enemies, you moved to the next area... that was the deal. BioShock flipped that formula on its head and took a page from the immersive sim. Players were given the ability to add elemental powers to your arsenal. Now you could shoot electricity out of your hands, freeze an enemy solid, or light an oil slick on fire and watch it spread across a room. You could turn a security turret against the very enemies that placed it there. The combination of weapons, the environment, and superhuman Plasmid abilities all gave players tools to approach combat in ways that weren't available in most other shooters of the time.

The Plasmid system was genuinely revolutionary for the genre. You had a weapon in one hand and a superpower in the other, and the game actively encouraged you to mix them together. Shocking a pool of water could electrocute multiple enemies at once. Freezing an enemy solid and hitting them with a wrench would shatter them completely. The environment itself became a weapon, and while environmental hazards and traps had existed in first person shooters in the past, it came no where near the level that BioShock had achieved. This kind of combat felt refreshing to players of the genre. The game was described at the time as the first "smart shooter" for its approach to combining powers with traditional firearms rather than just limiting combat to guns.

On top of the Plasmids, you had weapon upgrades, multiple ammo types, Gene Tonics that passively modified your abilities, a hacking system that let you reprogram security cameras and turrets, a research camera that rewarded you for studying enemies, and a moral choice system tied to the Little Sisters. For a shooter in 2007, that was an enormous amount of depth. It’s not hard to see why BioShock received numerous Game of the Year and gaming innovation awards after its release. The game was doing things that other shooters weren't even attempting.

So how does all of that hold up today? Honestly... it depends on which part you're talking about.

The Plasmids still feel great. Combining them with the environment and your weapons is still satisfying, and the creativity the game gives you with combat still surpasses what a lot of current shooters have to offer. That core idea hasn't aged a day. If anything, it feels MORE impressive now because we know how rare it is to get it right, many shooters have tried in the decades since BioShock’s release and have still fallen flat. When I was playing, it put me in a rhythm. I heavily relied on my Eletro Bolt plasmid to shock enemies and then follow up with gunfire. It’s the plasmid I probably used the most in the game. When I was met with electric resistant enemies, I made the switch over to winter blast or incinerate as the next best thing to stun my enemies before I unloaded.

It’s also worth noting that in the original game, there is no option to aim down sights on console versions, which is pretty standard in today’s first person shooters. They did add this in the remaster by pushing R3, but the game kind of relies heavily on shooting from the hip. Most “Boomer shooters” as they are called, prioritize fast, arena-style movement and accurate hip-fire. I thought this would be more of a pain to go back to this type of shooter, but it felt surprisingly natural and I almost prefer it to today’s FPS… maybe that’s just my preference because I’m old and this is what I grew up with.

That run-and-gun rhythm works great for standard enemies, but the pace completely changes when it's time to go against Big Daddies. Unlike the standard enemies big daddies don't aggro on sight, they are neutral walking tanks until you provoke them, which means you dictate exactly when the fight starts, another mechanic that was really unheard of for its time. You have to actively prepare for these encounters. I was setting tripwires, hacking nearby security cameras to bring in bot support, laying down proximity mines, and making sure I had the right armor-piercing or enhanced ammo loaded before I pulled the trigger. Once the Big Daddy is finally down, you face that moral choice: harvest the Little Sister for a big, immediate payout of ADAM, or save her for a smaller reward but better long-term care packages. It forces you to weigh your own survival and power progression against doing the right thing (I almost always play the good moral path in games with decisions like these).

Between those major combat encounters, the game heavily leans into its survival elements through constant looting and scavenging. I found myself digging through trash cans, desk drawers, and the pockets of dead Splicers looking for every spare dollar, bullet, or health kit I could find. Resources fluctuate from being aplenty to scarce and it can happen rather quickly, so I always tried to stay ahead of the game by fully stacking my arsenal to stay alive. All that cash you scavenge goes straight into the game's various vending machines and upgrades. Buying out essential supplies from these machines is a must, which is why the hacking system is so heavily utilized.

The hacking mini-game does slow the game down a bit. It's a pipe-connecting puzzle that completely stops the action every time you use it, and while it fits the world thematically, it can get old, especially later in the game when you're hacking practically everything. It didn’t bother me too much, but at times it does feel tedious. It's the one mechanic that feels most like a product of its time.

And the final boss battle. Ken Levine himself has said publicly he wasn't happy with it, and replaying it today, it's hard to disagree. After one of the most sophisticated narrative experiences in gaming history, the game ends with a fairly straightforward boss fight that doesn't really match the tone of everything that came before it and kind of falls flat. Honestly, fighting the Big Daddies are much more intense and entertaining than the final boss.

Those criticisms aside, BioShock's core gameplay is still incredibly fun and entertaining. Moving through Rapture, making choices about how to approach each encounter, discovering new Plasmid combinations, and deciding whether to spend your ADAM on new abilities or upgrades all still holds up decades later. Going back to it feels just as refreshing as it did when I booted it up back in 2007.

Verdict

So, that brings us back to the big question we started with: Is BioShock as good as we remember? 

When this game was released in 2007, it received a Metacritic score of 96. The game was the recipient of just about every game of the year award and multiple technical achievement awards in the gaming industry.

When you look at the complete package: the timeless Art Deco visuals, the brilliant audio design, a combat system that rewards your creativity, and a narrative with exceptional voice acting and possibly the biggest plot twist in gaming history, it's easy to see why this game left such a massive footprint on the industry. Sure, the hacking can get a little repetitive, and that final boss leaves a lot to be desired, but those are minor scratches on the glass of an otherwise flawless experience.

Going back to Rapture didn't ruin my nostalgia, it completely validated it. It reminded me exactly why this game pulled me back into gaming all those years ago. It proves that when developers prioritize incredible art direction and meaningful player choice over chasing pure technical specs, the end result doesn't really age. It respects your intelligence, challenges your morals, and lets you shoot lightning out of your hands. What more could you really ask for?

So my answer is a resounding yes, BioShock completely holds up today. This game is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and I’m giving it a 98 out of 100 on my Replay index making this an absolute must replay.